Food in ancient China – rice and tea

Chinese food: rice

Rice was the first grain that people farmed in China, and rice is such a basic food in China that the Chinese words for “cook” and “eat” both include the word for “rice”. At first people picked wild rice. But people were farming rice along the Yang-tse River by about 6000 BC.

People cooked rice by boiling them in water, the way you do today. They ate rice with fish and shellfish, like other people in prehistory. Or they made rice into wine. People have been drinking rice wine in China since prehistory.

In the north, people ate millet

But rice doesn’t grow in northern China, which is much drier and colder. People in northern China grew millet instead, starting about 8000 BC, and they gathered wild sorghum. By 5000 BC, many people in northern China ate mainly millet. They ate it boiled into a kind of porridge.

Wheat reaches China

Wheat was not native to China, so it took much longer to reach China. People in northern China first began to eat wheat about 2500 BC. Central Asian traders brought wheat to China from West Asia (and brought millet the other way). People in China boiled wheat like millet, to make something like Cream of Wheat.

These were the main carbohydrates of China – rice, millet, sorghum, and wheat. In northern China, people mostly ate millet, wheat, and sorghum. Or, if they couldn’t get those things, they lived on chestnuts. In southern China, people mostly ate rice. For fat, they crushed soybeans for soybean oil. Poor people ate almost nothing but these foods – they hardly ever had meat or fruit.

Fish and vegetables

Peaches growing on a peach tree

People probably first came to China following the fish north along the Pacific coast, and by about 40,000 BC they invented pottery, probably in order to store fish and make pickled fish or fermented fish sauce. That made their rice taste a lot better!

Chicken and other meat

By 4000 or 3000 BC, they were eating pork, sheep, and cattle, which all reached China from Central Asia. But most of the meat may have gone to men: by 500 BC in the Eastern Zhou dynasty, women were eating less meat and millet than men, and more soybeans and barley.

Taoism and Chinese food

Around 500 BC, the Taoist philosophy of Lao Tzu brought new ideas to Chinese medicine and Chinese food. Taoists believed that all foods could be divided into yin foods and yang foods. If you didn’t eat a good balance of yin and yang foods, you would get sick.

Which Chinese foods were yin?

Foods that grew up in the air, like fruit on trees, were more yin. So peaches, wine, and citrons were yin. People often called these “cold” foods, though that’s not about their temperature or their spiciness.

Which Chinese foods were yang?

Foods that grew under the ground, like onions and garlic, were more yang. Sea salt, meat, eggs, chicken, fish, and cheese were also yang. People called these “hot” foods.

Foods that grow right on the ground, like rice and wheat, were in the middle.

People liked to pair yin and yang foods – cold and hot foods – up. They would eat a yang food like cheese with a yin food like wine, or with fruit. They felt that these foods tasted good together. Plus, eating them together helped to keep your body in a healthy balance.

Noodles in China

During the Han Dynasty, millet wine became very popular and was even more popular to drink than tea. Also beginning in the Han Dynasty, about 100 AD, Chinese people began to make their wheat and rice into long noodles. People ate noodles instead of bread to save on fuel, just like they cut up their meat and vegetables to save on fuel. Boiling and frying took less charcoal than baking.

The invention of tofu

Because meat was so expensive, and because Buddhists didn’t eat meat, starting around the Song Dynasty (about 1000 AD) people also put tofu, or bean curd, in their food as a source of protein. (Tofu is a yin food – a cold food.) Around the same time, the loss of northern China to the Jurchen led the Southern Song dynasty to turn southward. People ate more rice and green vegetables, and less meat, wheat, and millet.

The Mongols bring Central Asian food to China

Marco Polo, who may have visited China from Venice, wrote that by the time of Kublai Khan, about 1200 AD, Chinese people ate millet boiled in milk to make porridge. Even as late as 1200 AD, Chinese people did not bake bread. But they did also get purple carrots from Central Asia through the work of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan.

A cookbook from medieval China

About 1350 AD the artist Ni Zan wrote a cookbook – a Collection of Rules for Drinking and Eating – that included recipes for soy sauce, noodles, crab and fish, mushrooms, tempeh, snails, and jellyfish, among other things.

Did you find out what you wanted to know about ancient Chinese food? Let us know in the comments! And check out how Chinese food changed when European ships brought American foods to China.

24 Comments

I’m sorry you don’t like it! But Chinese food *is* deeply entwined with rice: the Mandarin Chinese word for “cook” is zuò fàn and the word for “eat” is chī fàn. Fàn, the root in both words, means rice. (Thanks to Edward Rickford for the info; I don’t speak Chinese.)

It’s nasty that they ate snails and jellyfish? The Romans also ate a lot of snails, and so do people in modern France. They don’t think anything of it. I’ve eaten them myself, though I admit I’ve never tried jellyfish.

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